You may want to check your Google account storage situation if you back up your WhatsApp conversations to Drive on Android. In 2018, WhatsApp and Google announced that you could save your WhatsApp chat history to Drive without it counting towards your storage quota. But starting in December 2023, backing up the messaging app to Drive will count towards your Google account cloud storage space if you’re WhatsApp beta user. If you don’t use the app’s beta version, you won’t be feeling the change in policy until next year when it “gradually” makes its way to all Android devices.

[…]

Google has linked to its storage management tools in its post to make it easier to remove large files or photos you no longer need. You can also delete items from within WhatsApp, so they’ll no longer be included in your next backup. Of course, you also have the option to purchase extra storage with Google One, which will set you back at least $2 a month for 100GB. The company promises to provide eligible users with “limited, one-time Google One promotions” soon, though, so it may be best to wait for those before getting a subscription. Take note that this change will only affect you if you back up your chat history using your personal account. If you have a Workspace account through your job or another organization, you don’t have to worry about WhatsApp taking up a chunk of your cloud storage space.

Source: WhatsApp chats backed up to Google Drive will soon take up storage space

[…]

a film made of a compound derived from limonene, the main component of citrus fruit peel, and chitosan, a biopolymer derived from the chitin present in exoskeletons of crustaceans.

The film was developed by a research group in São Paulo state, Brazil, comprising scientists in the Department of Materials Engineering and Bioprocesses at the State University of Campinas’s School of Chemical Engineering (FEQ-UNICAMP) and the Packaging Technology Center at the Institute of Food Technology (ITAL) of the São Paulo State Department of Agriculture and Supply, also in Campinas.

The results of the research are reported in an article published in Food Packaging and Shelf Life.

[…]

Limonene has been used before in film for food packaging to enhance conservation thanks to its antioxidant and anti-microbial action, but its performance is impaired by volatility and instability during the packaging manufacturing process, even on a laboratory scale.

[…]

“The films with the poly(limonene) additive outperformed those with limonene, especially in terms of antioxidant activity, which was about twice as potent,” Vieira said. The substance also performed satisfactorily as an ultraviolet radiation blocker and was found to be non-volatile, making it suitable for large-scale production of packaging, where processing conditions are more severe.

The films are not yet available for use by manufacturers, mainly because chitosan-based plastic is not yet produced on a sufficiently large scale to be competitive, but also because the poly(limonene) production process needs to be optimized to improve yield and to be tested during the manufacturing of commercial packaging.

[…]

More information: Sayeny de Ávila Gonçalves et al, Poly(limonene): A novel renewable oligomeric antioxidant and UV-light blocking additive for chitosan-based films, Food Packaging and Shelf Life (2023). DOI: 10.1016/j.fpsl.2023.101085

Source: Research group develops biodegradable film that keeps food fresh for longer

BorgBackup (short: Borg) is a deduplicating backup program. Optionally, it supports compression and authenticated encryption.The main goal of Borg is to provide an efficient and secure way to backup data. The data deduplication technique used makes Borg suitable for daily backups since only changes are stored. The authenticated encryption technique makes it suitable for backups to not fully trusted targets.

Source: Borg Documentation — Borg – Deduplicating Archiver 1.0.0 documentation

Using nanostructured glass, scientists from the University’s Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) have developed the recording and retrieval processes of five dimensional (5D) digital data by femtosecond laser writing.

The storage allows unprecedented properties including 360 TB/disc data capacity, thermal stability up to 1,000°C and virtually unlimited lifetime at room temperature (13.8 billion years at 190°C ) opening a new era of eternal data archiving

Source: Eternal 5D data storage could record the history of humankind

They use many of 3 brands:
Most failures – Seagate
Middle – Western Digital
Best / least failures – Hitachi

Backblaze Blog » What Hard Drive Should I Buy?.

Interestingly, they use consumer grade hard disks, so the drives they use are the ones you buy.

Backblaze’s study finds that both AFR and MTBF are bunk. The document finds that disks follow the predicted “bathtub” curve of failure: lots of early failures due to manufacturing errors, a slow decline in failure rates to a shallow bottom and then a steep increase in failure rates as drives age.Backblaze’s disk longevity study shows something pretty close to the ‘bathtub’ curve one would expect
The study then looked at when drives fail and found a drive that survives the 5.1 per cent AFR of its first 18 months under load will then only fail 1.4 per cent of the time in the next year and half. After that, things get nasty: in year three a surviving disk has an 11.8 per cent AFR. That still leaves over 80 per cent of drives alive and whirring after four years, a decent outcome.
The study also predicts accelerated failure rates in years four and five, guesstimating things will get very, very bad in years four and five.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/12/server_server_in_the_rack_whens_my_disk_drive_going_to_crack/

Blinding fast virtual storage appliance gets rid of managing LUNs or disks and gives you virtual disks. Easy to set up in 8 minutes, it can be run by anyone without needing specific storage experience. It’ll be taking on EMC for speed and price.

Tintri – Storage for VMs.

SMB Traffic Analyzer (SMBTA in the following) is a software package to monitor and create statistics about the data flow on one or more Samba servers. Statistical data can be automatically created for users, Samba services, as well as complete domains. In difference to typical network scanners, SMBTA does not listen on the network card directly. Instead a different approach has been chosen. SMBTA works from within the Virtual File System layer in Samba, runs completely transparent to the user, and transfers it’s collected data through the network to a receiver, building a SQL storage from the data.

SMB Traffic Analyzer « hhetter’s blog.

This is an amazing piece of kit!

So if you feel like Barbapappa and don’t mind your building to only cost $30,000.- this may be your roomy option!

Buy them here

It was one of the most iconic and heart-stopping movie images of 2003: the Columbia Space Shuttle ignited, burning and crashing to earth in fragments.

Now, amazingly, data from a hard drive recovered from the fragments has been used to complete a physics experiment – CXV-2 – that took place on the doomed Shuttle mission.

Columbia’s fragments were painstakingly and exhaustively collected. Amongst them was a 400MB Seagate hard drive which was in the sort of shape you think it would be in after being in an explosive fire and then hurled to earth from several miles up with a ferocious impact.

The Johnson Space Centre workers analysing the shuttle crash sent it off the CVX-2 (Critical Viscosity of Xenon) experiment engineers, who sent it on to Kroll Ontrack in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to see if the data, any data, could be recovered. For researcher Robert Berg and his team it was the only hope, a terribly slim hope, of salvaging significant data from the experiment looking at Xenon gas flows in microgravity.

The Kroll people managed to recover 90 percent or so of the 400MB of data from the drive with its cracked and burned casing. Now, a few years on, Berg and his team have analysed the data and reported the experiment and its results in the April edition of the Physical Review E journal. These showed that, rather liked whipped cream which changes from a fluid to a near-solid after being whipped or stirred vigorously, the gas Xenon change its viscosity from gas to liquid when similarly treated in very low gravity. The phenomenon of a sudden change in viscosity is called shear thinning.

It was a highly complex experiment needing prologed and detailed analysis of the data on the hard drive to discover the shear thinning effect. But it, like the drive, was eventually found. So ends a twenty-year research project and in doing so helps bring to a finish the dreadful story of the Columbia Space Shuttle mission.

Official URL Link

The ST506 hard drive

Seagate is celebrating the shipment of its one billionth disk drive after 29 years in biz. The storage giant reckons it will reach its second billion in less than five-years’ time.

Seagate said it’s shipped the equivalent of 79 million terabytes of storage since the company made its first hard drive in 1979.

Its debut product, the ST506 hard drive, had a 5MB capacity, weighed about five pounds, and cost $1,500 (£757). Today, Seagate sells 1TB drives for under a third of that price.

The company figures its next 1,000,000,000 drives will go down easier based on the ever-increasing demand for storage. Gartner Group last year estimated more than 500 million drives were shipped worldwide, compared to about 30 million in 1990.

Seagate claimed that by the time its closest rival, Western Digital, reaches a billion drives shipped, Seagate will already be close to shipping its second billion. ®

Official TheRegister URL

Hitachi has done an about turn and decided it won’t be selling its struggling hard drive division.

The division was formed when Hitachi bought IBM’s disk business in 2002 and has made losses for almost every quarter since. In late 2007 Hitachi was trying to sell the business to private equity group Silver Lake.

But, updating investors today, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies said it would continue to run the business on its own. It will keep on cutting costs, which fell 13 per cent in 2007, and improve its focus – it got out of the 1 and 1.89 inch markets last year.

But the company said it might consider further funding alternatives in the future – it could be that the Silver Lake deal is another victim of the credit crunch as much as a change in strategy.

The firm said it was very serious about “becoming self-sufficient,” which is nice.

It made a profit in the second half of 2007 on revenues of $5.56bn and hopes to end 2008 in profit. It hopes to ship 558 million units in 2008 – 12 per cent more than last year. ®

Official URL Link

Big Blue has made yet another storage buy, this time scooping up privately-held Diligent Technologies for an undisclosed sum, although rumors peg the price at $200m.

The company, which has in recent months been on a considerable storage spending spree, said today that the Framingham, Massachusetts and Tel Aviv, Israel-based de-duplication software specialist will be folded into IBM’s System Storage biz unit.

This acquisition is IBM’s third swoop on an Israel-based outfit in as many months. Just last week it swallowed up FilesX, which has operations in Haifa and Newton, Massachusetts.

IBM’s storage beefery comes as it makes a grab for Web 2.0 apps, digital archives, and digital media.

IBM’s system storage general manager Andy Monshaw said: “Diligent’s data de-duplication software is a critical technology that will be integrated into the IBM Storage portfolio to further extend our information infrastructure strategy, allowing our clients to eliminate redundant data and streamline the infrastructure required to support their business – which can result in dramatic improvements in data centre efficiency.”

Diligent’s de-duplication technology will be slotted into IBM’s new enterprise data centre model, the mantra of which is heavily-loaded with the industry’s favourite buzzwords – virtualisation, green IT, and cloud computing.

The startup has a number of reseller deals with other storage vendors that use Diligent’s ProtecTier software including Overland, HDS, and Sun. It’s not known at this stage how IBM will handle these agreements under the merger, which is subject to the normal regulatory requirements.

Diligent, which has secured close to $47m in fundage, previously served as EMC’s Israel research and development lab before being spun-out from the the storage firm in 2002.

Over the past few months acquisition-hungry IBM has bought Softek, NovusCG, XIV, Arsenal Digital Solutions, and FilesX.

Iomega has dumped its Chinese fiancé and is running away with the richest man in the room. Yes, it’s EMC, which last month interrupted Iomega’s plans to marry a subsidiary of Great Wall Technology, with an unasked for and spurned offer of $178m.

EMC returned a few days later with more dough, about $213m cash, or $3.85 a share. All in all, not a bad price for a company that pulled in net income of just $10.1m in 2007. The upside for EMC is Iomega’s net revenues of $336.6m and more than $60m cash in hand.

So, Iomega knows how to sell but appears to have forgotten how to make money when selling. This is not a problem that EMC is familiar with. We suspect a lot of cost-saving “synergies” will be found.

Anyhow, offer no.2 was enough to get Iomega’s board talking. And today they said yes to the deal, which will see the company metamorphose into the bedrock of EMC’s new consumer/small business product division.

So what does EMC get for its money? A live consumer brand, yes, retail and small biz channels to market, yes, revenues, yes. Technology? We doubt that EMC’s particularly interested in Iomega’s technology – here is a company after all that is still best known for the Zip external drive (when did you last see one of those.) But Iomega is known at least for something. And it is interested enough in EMC technology to have bundled its partner’s backup software with all external hard drives since 2004.

Iomega shareholders should get their cash tender offers in two weeks or so. EMC says the deal will have no material impact for the full fiscal year, which just goes to show how bloody big it is. Iomega is paying off ExcelStor Great Wall Technology Limited with a $7.5m termination fee. The two had agreed to merge last December.

The acquisition is expected to close in June. In the meantime you can peek at the EMC victory statement.

Official URL Link

NAS boxes generally too bulky for you? Then how about Buffalo’s new LinkStation Mini? Announced yesterday, the compact server packs in 1TB of storage capacity using a pair of RAID-configured 2.5in hard drives.

The 13.3 x 8.1 x 3.9cm device has a Gigabit Ethernet port on the back for network connectivity, and a USB port to allow users to hook up extra storage or a shared printer.

The $699 unit supports the usual SMB and FTP protocols for making files available to all or a select few, and HTTP and HTTPS for serving data in a web-wise way.

Official URL Link

Seagate drive in orbit, why not?

Seagate has begun shipping what it says is the world’s first 1TB SAS hard drives, as well as the first self-encrypting enterprise-oriented hard drives.

The 3.5-inch Barracuda ES.2 HDD series now comes in a serial-attached SCSI interface and 1TB capacity. Seagate estimates the speedier SAS data transfer rate offers an average 135 per cent performance boost over the SATA interface. The 1TB SATA version of Barracuda began shipping last year.

Today’s “official” introduction of 1TB SAS hard drives should offer a tempting combination of capacity and performance for high-end storage operators armed with an enlarged coin purse. Seagate is pitching the whole ordeal as a value from a cost-per-GB basis.

The Barracuda ES.2 series of SAS drives spin at 7200 rpm, and advertise a 1.2 million hours mean time between failure. The drive uses a 16MB cache and has an average latency of 4.16ms. Average random seek time is 8.5ms and random write speed is 9.5ms. Models are also available in 500GB and 750GB capacity with both SAS and SATA interfaces.

Seagate doesn’t list a price for the 1TB whopper, although our internet window shopping suggests around $350 per drive. That’s about a $50 premium over the similar SATA model.

Seagate has also announced a new version of its Cheetah HDD lineup for data centers that features automatic encryption technology baked into the drive’s controller.

The 3.5-inch Cheetah 15k.6 FDE (Full Disk Encryption) comes in 450GB, 300GB, and 147GB flavors with both SAS and Fibre Channel interfaces.

Earlier this year, the company began putting automatic data encryption into laptop drives. Seagate has stated it expects the technology to become standard for all hard drives.

The drives will ship to OEM suppliers this quarter. They should start popping up in vendor arrays later this year. ®

Official Register Link

Folks may be tightening their wallets under gray economical times, but the need to keep close tabs on our fellow man is in as great of demand as ever.

That’s why EMC rolling out a handful of new services to assist customers in linking storage systems to the video surveillance units, card readers, alarms, intrusion detection systems, and so on that keep humanity from reverting to a pack of wild, rampaging animals.

The storage vendor is teaming up with video security specialist and domestic spying technology supplier, Verint Systems to implement the services, which are available now. EMC will target customers in retail, financial services, gaming, transportation, air travel, correctional facilities, education, border control — you name it — who have heaps of digital surveillance devices that are disconnected from each another, and no storage plan to sift through the data.

EMC’s new security service assessment is a three-parter:

1) Assessment for Physical Security: where EMC and Verint, (as well as partners such as Unisys, British Telecom, Orion Systems Group and others) identify a customer’s security requirements.

2) Design for Physical Security: uses the information collected in the assessment plan to design a customer’s physical security environment to include any available connectivity between items such as cameras, alarms, video archiving, encoders, video software and network services.

3) Implementation for Physical Security: is all about selling a bundle that includes Verint IP video software and EMC Clariion-based storage. EMC says it will also install everything, including cameras and other physical security devices.

Official Register Link

There’s nothing wrong in theory with a vendor that caters to large corporations having a crack at the consumer market.

Yet perhaps in being so dependent on the colossal proportions of Brobdingnag, one loses a true sense of scale for the outside world. Ditching metaphors: data centers are willing to spend a lot on hardware. Your average household, not so much.

So here’s EMC’s first product designed, tested, manufactured and sold in a single country outside of the US. It’s the 4TB network storage box, the StorageCredenza, today being introduced for Chinese — and at the moment only Chinese —consumers.

EMC says a household can get their hands on the basic model with one terabyte capacity (4x 250GB SATA drives) for only 8,980 yuan.

Official Link

Although NetApp fired the first volley in its ZFS lawsuit against Sun Microsystems, Sun has been the aggressor since NetApp’s initial strike. Following NetApp’s lawsuit last September charging that Sun violated several of its patents regarding ZFS, Sun countersued and accused NetApp of violating Sun’s patents. Sun has also asked the U.S. Patents Office to re-examine several NetApp patents.

Sun filed yet another lawsuit Wednesday, alleging patent infringement related to storage management technology NetApp acquired when it bought Onaro in January.

“As NetApp attempts to extend its product line, it also expands its exposure to Sun patents,” Dana Lengkeek of Sun’s Corporate Communications office wrote in an emailed statement.

The latest lawsuit filed in U.S. Discrict Court in the northern district of California claims that software NetApp gained from Onaro uses Sun’s patented technology. Sun seeks compensation from NetApp for patent infringement and an injunction preventing NetApp from using Sun’s technology.

Sun also revealed the U.S. Patent Office granted its request to re-examine NetApp’s patent related to its “copy on write” technology.